rules-oriented father really needed to know.
My parents … I suppose one could call them generic. In the absence of any overarching quirks or pathologies, they had ended up defaulting on the side of cheapness, dirt management and chore scheduling—which is to say, they ended up like most parents. Father had his garage, off the floor of which you could, if you wished, eat one of my mother’s economically prepared meals at precisely six o’clock every night, cardigan sweaters optional but preferred.
My father was killed in 1985, when I was twenty-five. He fell asleep at the wheel driving into Honolulu on the 78, ramming headfirst into an Isuzu truck with three local kids in the cab. Mother was unhurt, and remembers none of it. Funny—he seems so far away to me now. He never spoke much, and as a result I have few memories. Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you. In any event, at the airport he handed me five hundred dollars in lire, which for him was the equivalent of a normal person renting a biplane to spell out a goodbye in the sky. He was essentially a kind man.
Back at the dinner table that night, Leslie said, “I think I have some jumbo oversize sweaters that just might fit you.”
“Thank you, Leslie.”
“You’ll have hickeys all over your bum from being pinched.” William was attempting to be gallant in his way, flattering my young mind that, no matter what, I could still be wanted, however slim the odds.
Mother said, “Stop that, William. The Latin class sponsors this trip, not your friends with their hot rods. I might add, last week I was driving a bit too slowly on Cross Creek and your friend Allan Blake gave me the finger. He didn’t know it was me, but I knew it was him, and I never want to see him here again, you hear?”
William was still focused on my trip. “I bet you fall for some guy who works at a Fiat factory.”
“Marcello,” added Leslie, “a fiery idealist. Chianti bottles. A sweaty undershirt—picnics beside the autostrada—”
“He slaps you around a bit. He gets jealous easily—”
“But you’d kill for him—”
“Stop!” My mother was appalled at how sexualized her two eldest children were. The only comfort she seemed to find was my incontestable virginity. “Lizzie is going to go to Rome, and she is going to learn about the great works of art there, and … eat Roman food, and …” Words temporarily failed her. “… become a serious and scholarly young woman.”
Even my own spirits were dampened by such a clinical vision of Rome. Truth was, I wanted to see naked statues of people because I was too embarrassed to pick up certain magazines in certain stores, the ones in the part of town it took me three bus transfers to reach. I always wimped out and stayed up front reading the knitting catalogues. Why they even bothered stocking catalogues up front is beyond me. The real clientele of those places always lurked at the store’s rear, exclusively men, clad in raincoats, toupées and shame.
To me, the thought of Rome—a city adorned with genitalia rather than vinyl siding and stucco—seemed improbable. I had to see this place. In the weeks leading up to the trip’s charter airline departure, I kept waiting for a TV studio’s buzzer to sound, for an audience to shriek at me, telling me that it was all a big prank.
Jeremy and I were alone in the hospital room well into the night, save for the sinister hiss of his oxygen, a speaker system squawking in another wing or the rare motorcycle gunning its engine on the road below. Jeremy’s eyes stayed shut. I wondered what I was going to say when he opened them—but it turned out I didn’t have to worry about that. Around three a.m., he opened them and said, “My name isn’t written in the Book of Life.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but answered, “Don’t be stupid. Of course it is.”
“No—you don’t understand—when they paddled me back here, I was already falling on my way to hell. I was yanked, like I was bungeed, back into this building.” He squeezed my wrist, as if taking my pulse. “It sucked the air out of me.”
“Jeremy, you’re not going to hell.” My son had no apparent aptitude for small talk, but that was fine, for nor do 1.1 said, “All that happened was that last night you did some very stupid party drugs, and now you’re paying the price. That stuff fries the wiring in your head like booster cables.”
“Let’s change the subject.”
“Done.”
We sat there feeling foolish.
Jeremy asked, “So, have you been preparing a speech to give me inside your head for the past twenty years?”
“Of course. You, too?”
“Yup.”
There was more silence, happier this time.
I said, “Neither of us is going to give the speech, right?”
“It’d be kind of corny.”
“It would.”
“I feel much better already.”
I asked, “How did you find me? I tried locating you for years with no luck. The government was really prickish about it.”
“Well, it’s amazing what you can find in this world if you’re willing to sleep with people.” He said this as if he were giving me a household hint.
“I suppose so.”
“I’d be a good spy.”
“I didn’t notice you spying on me for four years, so yes. When was the last time you ate?”
“As in food?”
“No, as in tractors. Of course I mean food.”
“I had a ninety-three-cent piece of pizza yesterday. At noon.” The unusual pizza price was a local merchandising twist; with tax, a slice came to one dollar.
“Those ninety-three-cent slices are about as good for you as a roasted bandage.”
“I swiped a block of mozzarella from the supermarket on Davie.”
“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything. So long as a block of cheese is still vacuum-sealed, the pizzerias accept them as currency. They give you a free slice, and maybe five bucks.”
“You’d risk a police record for five bucks and a microwaved Band-Aid?”
“It’s okay. The supermarket gives you two options if they catch you—one: they call the cops, and two: they take a Polaroid of you holding up whatever it was you shoplifted. It’s almost always cheese. And then they tell you never to come back into the store. They have this whole back wall covered with faded photos of street scum holding cheeses. It’s not as if I’m risking a police record. Merely a ritual humiliation.”
This was genuinely interesting to me. I said so.
“I bet you something.”
“What?
